• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
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    • Chapter 4
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    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
  • collected works
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    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
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    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: tectonic plates

on facing the Have

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2018, 7*, being, block, blue, bone, cause and effect, change, choice, clothes, clouds, Darwin, death, depth, discipline, doing, dream, drifting, economics, emerald, extermination, faces, government, green, grey, hats, Have, head, hills, hinge, humanity, identity, iron, kiss, life, loss, making, mud, music, neck, peacock, photography, power, quotidian, river, roof, settlement, shadow, Shrewsbury, slow, society, statue, stone, streets, tectonic plates, time, trees, violence, walls, war, watching, water, woman, World War, writing

                bone to stone drifting
                catastrophic slow

                lee to face-ward drifting
                shadow to quotidian

                suggesting life
                only when settled

                under branch of roof;
                noticeable change

                comes at the price
                of sheild and pike:

                death-mask disciplined
                to the painted face

                open to the very depth
                of loss, later settled

                to economies of
                plea, barter and

                proliferation of fact
                artisaned superfluous

                to being – faces fixed
                in leer the rest of

                born days, where
                animals are skinned

                under abnegated face,
                where stone walls

                turn green, staining
                clothing and where the

                emerald poise of head
                and neck watches

                the peck of open flay, all
                “exterminated by

                 slow acting and still
                 existing causes …”

                … time begins
                to tick – well it had to

                start somewhere – and
                with time cometh writing

                and with writing the
                topography fades from

                hill-wide face to
                pock-mark street and settlement

                all fitted ingeniously
                with raised wall over arch,

                high to unresolved descant
                always left in minor;

                the woman bends
                to the laundry before

                the rush of water
                released from the mill:

                power is only explicit
                when blocked and

                channelled, tree to
                gable with date

                and signature, silk
                to valence with

                drape of repose and spreading peacock dream;
                so, is there choice

                of governance: cut
                through from neck to child;

                you stay unnatural-still
                your image will be caught,

                you turn, and your
                head will disappear,

                you climb the wall
                and stand still, you

                stay in the mud yard
                and stand still, … only

                hats stay constant, cast-
                iron flanges reach

                from cast-circular
                hinges, woven to corset,

                slave to youth; the
                memorial stone,

                painfully-carved,
                reflects the blue

                of grey cloud, under
                posts of wire

                the death-etched
                face stoops to kiss

                the face of
                wholly mud

 

291218 – spent the afternoon at the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery to tread time from immemorial to the First World War; the quote is from “Thinking Path” by Shirley Chubb (2004), an exhibition that explores the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, an artwork and series of installations inspired by Darwin’s daily ritual of walking the same path at Down House; “Shadow Stories”, an animated short film by Samantha Moore is not directly referenced but weaves about the whole perambulation; references include the Roman conquest, medieval, Civil War, and industrial exhibits, up to the Open Art Exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the First World War

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

being & clouds & doing & identity & power wormhole: The Passage of the St. Gothard, 1804
blue & woman wormhole: SPRING AND ALL XI by William Carlos Williams
change & streets wormhole: to let be
death wormhole: What You Are by Roger McGough
dream wormhole: THURSDAY by William Carlos Williams
economics & society & walls & war wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees
faces wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows
green & shadow & trees & writing wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pageant of the trees
grey & time wormhole: La Route de Louveciennes, 1870
Have wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
life wormhole: ‘… and yet I think I am so modest: …’
music wormhole: JANUARY by William Carlos Williams
river wormhole: quiet river
roof wormhole: breakfast
stone wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
water wormhole: SPRING AND ALL I by William Carlos Williams

 

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Open – All – Ours

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

2017, 8*, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, brown, buildings, clouds, dedication, echo, generation, identity, land, lifetimes, living, Mahayana, Open All Hours, pocket, punya, rain, Shantideva, sky, smile, stone, tectonic plates, true nature, work

                Open – All – Ours

                out across the vast land
                of all of my many lives

                what started as a stave-
                shack has long-since

                become a stone colossus
                wider than the sky in which

                my own clouds rain,
                with openings measureless

                to man and tectonic plates
                stacked up and arching

                in inconceivable echo;
                that’s where we all work,

                life after life, all by my-selves
                meticulously stocking up

                even anything so small,
                taking whole lifetimes

                sometimes to place a
                single smile in its right

                and proper place because
                you never know when it

                might come in handy;
                well, it’s a living; do you

                like my trusty brown
                overcoat – nice, deep

                pockets – comes with
                the job, been in my

                family now for so many
                generations now … once

                I catch up with myself

 

constructed out of Bodhicharyavatara, chapter three, verse ten, by Shantideva

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

brown wormhole: monument to vainglory
buildings wormhole: time
clouds wormhole: industrial estate
echo & sky wormhole: so pleased to see you again
identity & lifetimes wormhole: ‘never look up’?
living wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – agricultural show
rain wormhole: ah … // oh … // meanwhile … // … // tha ya ta …
smile wormhole: to allow / passage
stone wormhole: transmuted
work wormhole: neither nude nor / descending a staircase

 

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1964

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1960s, 1964, 2014, angel, archetypes, beauty, Burt Bacharach, Diane di Prima, Dionne Warwick, dream, emptiness, feeling, hair, humanity, identity, imagination, life, light, lightning, lime, Manhattan, morning, myth, reality, San Francisco, shadow, streets, table, tectonic plates, the Summer of Love, time, walking, years

 

 

 

                           1964

                           she stood up from the
                           lime-green tablecloth we bought and walked
                           down through the streets
                           between morning shadows …

 

you’ll never get to heaven (if you break my heart): Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, Hal David; soon after I posted this I sat down and had lunch (sultanas and banana in porridge) and read the following passage which was so apropos that I just had to add it to this work; it is by Diane di Prima, “Recollections of My Life as a Woman”, the beginning of chapter 19 – I haven’t asked permission (don’t know how to), but I just wanted to share it, it’s brilliant:

Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were, and there is always a price to pay for them.   They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred.   The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called ‘real world’.   Or we are somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live.   Sometimes with deadly rapidity.

This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going.   Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful.   Vivid, bright, and deadly, like some tropical flowers.   Not human.   Not cut to our measure.

But we – we couldn’t see that.   Thought we were gods …

‘The 60s’ are often referred to as such a time, though what is usually meant by the term is merely ‘The Summer of Love’ and its aftermath: 1967 and 68.   Tip of the iceburg, if you ask me.

For me most of the 1960s, and on to about 1976, was a time bathed in the mythic.   It was a time when the archetypes stalked the streets of Manhattan, numinous and often deadly.   When angels, incubi, and other dreams of what could be settled in your hair and refused to be brushed aside.   When we see the creatures that lived in the fog worlds of San Francisco as casually as you see your corner grocery.

                                                      .

We had struggled so long and so furiously to find, reach into, the world of our feelings, our secret knowledges, and intuitions, and it was as if Something had caught us up, caught the hand we had slipped through the gap, and that Something was now pulling us in.   Pulling us under.   For as certainly as we knew that behind the facades our parents had lived there was the world of human feeling, behind that world was yet another that sought to claim us.   What I have called the World of Archetypes.   Inexorable bundles of soul purpose, often wearing human or humanoid form, sometimes walking among us.   Without conscience and without regret.   And so beautiful!

As I can tell you now, behind the Archetypes are vast impersonal patterns or textures of energies we might call Orisha.   Or Yidam.

And behind that, perhaps the Void dances, not black, cold, or empty as we have believed, but dancing with light, sheet lightnings spread as a series of surfaces over nothing.   And moving faster than the eye can register.   Even the eye of the mind.

Our downfall was – it was so beautiful.   For us, who had replaced religion, family, society, ethics with Beauty, who saw ourselves as in the service of Beauty, no warnings were understood, no traps anticipated.   To go down in the servive of That – that was the ultimate grace.

But archetypes have their own drama: a vast uncharted cycle of Comedia dell’Arte, which they play out through us, without our informed concent.   And with, ultimate, no concern for human purpose.

And it is not without reason that we have been handed by the science of our time the image, the fact or metaphor, of tectonic plates.   Earth continents floating on a core of molten magma.   As we ourselves float, melting a little, changing shape.   Bumping against each other, lifted by, dependent on, in total chemical exchange with, the molten soul stuff I have here called Archetypes.   That seeks to brek through to the surface wherever the plates are thin.

The plates were very thin in 1964.

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

1964 wormhole: sixty four sixty five – poewieview #1
beauty wormhole: [s]
[Burt] Bacharach wormhole: 1963
Dionne Warwick wormhole: nothing to write
dream wormhole: dream career // groggy
emptiness & walking wormhole: and that’s where I are
hair wormhole: Shonagh – poewieview #17
identity wormhole: rhymed
Manhattan wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012
life wormhole: mauve
light wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
lightning wormhole: first Spring storm
lime wormhole: thick thick fog
morning wormhole: hinged – From Hell ch. V
reality wormhole: top table
shadow wormhole: up on the hill
streets wormhole: tabla
table wormhole: Soir Bleu, 1914
time wormhole: a theremin note – poewieview #21
years wormhole: the sounds of 1969 // [would have] seemed that way – poewieview #13

 

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes." ~ Annie Dillard

pages coagulating like yogurt

  • Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Introduction
  • collected works
    • 25th August 1981 – count Up
    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • Bob 1995-2012
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
    • through the crash
  • index
    • #A-E see!
    • F–K, wha’ th’
    • L-P 33 1/3 rpm
    • Q-T pie
    • U-Z together forever
  • me
  • others
  • poemics
  • poeviews
  • teaching matters
  • William Carlos Williams
  • wormholes

recent leaks …

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  • YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW by William Carlos Williams
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